Digital video capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless communication devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, video gaming devices, cellular or satellite radio telephones, or the like. Digital video devices implement video compression techniques, such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, or H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), to transmit and receive digital video more efficiently. Video compression techniques perform spatial and temporal prediction to reduce or remove redundancy inherent in video signals.
In video coding, video compression generally includes spatial prediction, motion estimation, and motion compensation. In particular, intra-coding relies on spatial prediction to reduce or remove spatial redundancy in video within a given video frame. Inter-coding relies on temporal prediction to reduce or remove temporal redundancy in video within adjacent frames. For inter-coding, a video encoder performs motion estimation to track the movement of matching video blocks between two or more adjacent frames. Motion estimation generates motion vectors, which indicate the displacement of video blocks relative to corresponding video blocks in one or more reference frames. Motion compensation uses the motion vector to generate a prediction video block from a reference frame. After motion compensation, a residual video block is formed by subtracting the prediction video block from the original video block.
The video encoder applies transform, quantization, and entropy coding processes to further reduce the bit rate of the residual block. Entropy coding generally involves the application of arithmetic codes or variable length codes (VLCs) to further compress residual coefficients produced by the transform and quantization operations. Examples include context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) and context-adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC), which may be used as alternative entropy coding modes in some encoders. A video decoder performs inverse operations to reconstruct the encoded video, using the motion information and residual information for each of the blocks.